Optimizing Rakudo Perl 6

After much work, the Rakudo implementation of Perl 6 now supports a lot of the features laid out in the Perl 6 language specification. For many potential users, missing features are not a great blocker; today, performance is a much more important one. Now the foundations are laid, current work on Rakudo involves a focus on implementing optimizers, and optimizing the compiler and runtime environment itself.

While there's a long way to go, this work has already produced results; for example, Rakudo at the time of writing runs a Mandelbrot benchmark almost 20 times faster than it could earlier on in the year. In this talk I'll discuss a variety of the optimizations we've already done, are currently working on, and have lined up in the future.